Entering the hot zone - can you handle the heat and be cool?

With the latest gaming systems such as X-box, Playstation 3, PSP, IPTV, and H264 requiring more bandwidth, packaged in smaller devices, and providing higher quality, in return they evacuate more heat and consume more power, thus making power consumption and thermal dissipation a major issue for chip designers in the nanometer era. Thermal effect on the chip and package is the next wave. First, there was signal integrity. Then power integrity and now, there is a new first-order effect in the horizon for IC and system designers called thermal integrity. And the traditional design methodology of using uniform temperature across the chip is becoming woefully inadequate and provides insufficient data to the package and system designers, unable to meet the requirement and demands of the consumer. To better understand the impact of temperature variation on chip's performance, both power distribution and package characteristics must be considered in the design and analysis flow. Likewise, a realistic view of the heat distribution across the chip is becoming essential for package and system designers. What makes the analysis of signal, power, and thermal integrity effects challenging is that they must all be considered concurrently across the entire chip, which requires novel approaches to mitigate the issue. The panel discusses how urgent is the impact of thermal integrity on system designs and is this a real concern or are we making it up? When and under what condition it became urgent, and is it related to process nodes, low power applications, type of packaging used, etc.? Is there specific design techniques used for more specific multimedia processing? Can you separate the IC design from package and system designs with some assumptions or is co-design the only way? How accurate is the industry's understanding of the physics of the chip (device), interconnect, and package? Is thermal integrity a first order or second order effect? Given the other variations from nominal, how important is this? The moderator concludes with a summary of the panelist comments and be able to make a forward-looking statement about the future of power and heat and their impact on system design.